A visit from Michael Rosen

We were very honoured to welcome author and poet Michael in January. Michael Rosen is a British children’s author, poet, presenter and academic and is now a professor of children’s literature in the Department of Educational Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has also served as Children’s Laureate.

This was our second visit from Michael. This time he conducted a series of workshops to a range of different year groups. Michael gave a poetry workshop to the whole of Year 7 where he told stories of his family’s experiences during the Second World War and the students worked together to create some very moving poetry on themes of family, home, flight, empathy for others and compassion. After lots of book signing and interactions with students and staff, he worked with LVC dance company to plan a collaboration for a concert in June and he finished the day writing protest song lyrics with GCSE musicians. At the end of the day, very unexpectedly, we had a visit from ITV who filmed an interview with Michael Rosen performing his poems in our library with the homework club looking on silently. This was broadcast on ITV Evening News on the same day.